PLAUSIBLE: An abundance of sensual detail grounds Rosenbaum’s alien tales in the familiar. |
| The Ant King and Other Stories | By Benjamin Rosenbaum | Small Beer Press | 234 pages | $24 |
You could file Benjamin Rosenbaum’s debut collection of genre-blurring short stories under a number of categories: speculative or science fiction, fantasy, fairy tale, surrealism, irrealism, slipstream, postmodern parables. But the description that proves most accurate comes from one of Rosenbaum’s own stories: plausible fabulism. Put out by Small Beer Press in Western Mass, The Ant King and Other Stories zips along in a way that is lively, bizarre, and funny as well as dark, sinister, and sensual. Comparisons with Kelly Link and Aimee Bender are natural; there are also glimmers of Barthes, Barthelme, and Calvino — and, of course, a fleet of science-fiction writers.Rosenbaum sent his first story to the New Yorker at age 13. He quit writing as a sophomore at Brown, where he pursued computer programming and religious studies, became a programmer, and then started writing again at 27. His dual university pursuits dance throughout the collection.
In the title story — a corporate-culture send-up and classic rescue quest, with echoes of Orpheus and Eurydice and on-line gaming geekdom — a character named Vampire spouts code-toadery: “What do you know about NetBSD 2.5 routing across multiple DNS servers?” In “Embracing-the-New,” there’s a sense of mythmaking. “How can the Godless really be godless,” asks an apprentice idol carver. “For without a god, a person would just be a shifting collection of memories.”
And though these stories are populated by wish-granting hedgehogs, a world-ruling piece of fruit, and a pack of kids out real-estate shopping, the worlds Rosenbaum creates feel less like a separate or “alternate” reality and more like a colorful, if complicated, extension of the one we know. There’s a sensuality that helps ground us in the otherwise alien scenarios. From “The Valley of Giants”: “The giants whisper and hum, placing their great soft lips against your belly, your back. They stroke your hair, and their fingers, as big as plates, are so delicate. . . . The giant women feed you from their breasts. . . . The milk is sweet and rich like crème brûlée.” In “Orphans,” a woman falls in love with an elephant. “He would hold me to his chest, and I would be bathed in the deep smell of him, wild and rich.” In “Red Leather Tassels,” a woman whose husband is eyeing another woman has sex with an ancient woodpecker. “George’s wife felt a pleasant, feathery tickling.”
Rosenbaum also employs the old trick of critiquing his own narrator. “A woman steps off a cliff,” he begins in “On the Cliff by the River.” Then, “No. That’s not the right place to start. Begin again.” This acknowledgment of the artifice of storytelling edges toward irritating. A real storyteller — and he is — doesn’t have to resort to “meta” sleights of hand.
But The Ant King is more often notable for its sparkly humor, deft allusions, and immediate language. And for its shadowy darkness. “Other Cities,” a series of mini-portraits of imagined places, includes this description of a person who might want to move to a place called Stin: “You recall that you are going to die, your heart pounds, and you are desperate to cling to your flesh, but more desperate still not to forget the fear, not to lapse back into the placid dullness of taking existence for granted. . . . ” Just one more way that these stories are odd, irreal, and as familiar and human as they are alien and otherworldly.
